


epithalamium

by carouselfancy



Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Moon Godlike Watcher, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:41:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carouselfancy/pseuds/carouselfancy
Summary: Edér is a little slow on the uptake, but she's happy to wait until he comes around to her way of thinking.Collection of snippets for Edér and the Watcher, because Obsidian is Wrong and they are in Love.
Relationships: Edér Teylecg/The Watcher
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	1. meeting

Io still has not accommodated to the awful vertigo that accompanies her visions, that feeling of standing on the precipice of a cliff, fighting the invisible tether at her navel pulling her body and her will forward into the abyss.

Speaking to Caldara de Barranzi, the dwarven animancer, unsettles her even more than the erratic, flashing visions she experienced at Cilant Lîs. The woman swings from the lowest branch of the tree like the ticking pendulum of a clock, a countdown to unbearable knowing. Her skin is rubbery, her face swollen and purple from the rope around her neck. Her eyes are closed, and yet Io feels them boring into her soul. She tries desperately to break the soul's hold on her, but she feels as though she has been turned to stone and trapped in this spot for eternity.

When the vision finally releases her, she nearly topples over backward, so intense is the rush of blood to her head. It requires every ounce of fortitude she can muster to stay on her feet as the cloudy blur of purples and blues clears from her mind.

"Seventeen and a half."

Io blinks.

"Could be eighteen depending on how you count the dwarf woman."

She recognizes the deep, drawling voice of the man who had greeted her as she entered the town, but she has to concentrate to see him through her haze. He's enormous—probably not for a human, but Io has to crane her neck to look at his face. It's weathered and mostly hidden behind a scruffy blond beard, and kind green eyes watch her below arched blond brows. He takes a long drag of the pipe in his hand. She recognizes the sharp smell of whiteleaf as he exhales.

Io remembers he had been speaking to her, and scrunches her face to recall what he had said.

"I—sorry?"

"The dwarf woman." He gestures at the swaying body with his pipe. Io does not look. "You were trying to figure out whether to count her as a full person. I think you outta."

She is so confused, she can't help the laugh that slips out of her. "I don't think I can afford not to," she says, her voice returning to its characteristic softness now that she is starting to break free of her previous stupor. "She surely counts as more a person than me."

His brow quirks upward, and she feels suddenly self-conscious. Her small fingers find the hem of her sleeve and tug restlessly. After a long moment, he shrugs and extends his hand. "Name's Edér. Though to the people around here, might as well be 'Nineteen.'" Io reaches for his hand, and it envelops hers easily. His skin is warm, despite the cold rain pouring down on them. When he pulls away, she finds herself mourning the empty space left behind.

Edér looks her up and down, his gaze critical, and she shudders at the familiar feeling of being evaluated. She is not a stranger to feeling eyes on her back, but Gilded Vale is a town more suspicious of the unusual than most, and she has been fighting the urge to pull a hood over her horns since she arrived here.

His evaluation feels different, however. His eyes seem to sparkle with mischief as he looks her over, and she feels his grimace is more for her benefit than anyone else's. She realizes that from the moment he'd spoken to her, she'd trusted him implicitly.

"Don't think I'd put you much higher than twenty-two, twenty-three, tops," he says finally, and clicks his tongue in disgust. Feigned disgust—she hopes. "You look like the sort that likes to get involved."

She can't help but glance back at the tree. The bodies sway eerily in the light breeze, their stench carried on the wind like an omen. A chill of unease rolls down her spine and she wraps her arms around herself. He leans casually against the crumbling wall of the old temple, packing more whiteleaf into his pipe, seemingly unbothered by the macabre scene. Io turns back to him. 

"How did you know I was looking at the dwarf woman?"

The knowing smirk he wears broadens across his face. It's the sort of smile that seems to shine actual light, even in the broad daylight. "I was smoking over here, saw you staring at her. Twice I refilled my pipe. You never so much as blinked. Your mouth was so slack I took you for a Raedric at first."

With a sidelong glance toward Aloth, Io steps closer toward him, twisting the end of her braid in her fingers. "Do you know what a Watcher is?" she asks quietly.

Edér seems to flinch, taking a step back from her and removing the pipe from his mouth. He glances about quickly before leaning closer to her, and the smell of his tobacco fills her nose. "Careful, friend." Io's heart flips at the word. She hasn't ever had anyone use it directly to her before. A wayward sense of longing overtakes her just to hear it, and she loses the rest of his warning in her momentary distraction. She only needs to see the condemning glances from the onlookers around her, and she doesn't think she needs to ask him to repeat himself.

"Either case, maybe I'm not Nineteen after all," Edér chuckles, replacing the pipe in between his lips. "No offense."

She stares forlornly at him, but finds it hard to truly feel that sense of doom when faced with Edér's affable smile.

Edér recounts his dire situation in the Dyrwood with easy jokes and flippant nonchalance. Io finds herself envying the ease with which he seems to process the darkness around him. Would Edér have cried, like she had, seeing the broken and bleeding bodies of her new friend lying on the ground so soon after she had met him? Somehow, she doubts it. She thinks of Heodan, who had smiled so reluctantly at her while they made camp in the caverns of Cilant Lîs, and feels her body begin to shake.

"Lucky or unlucky?"

Io's head swivels toward him so fast she feels a joint pop in her neck, her pulse pounding in her ears. She gazes at him with wide, terrified eyes, trying to determine the nature of his question. "Excuse me?" She has learned to keep her words polite, unobtrusive, inoffensive. She has learned to keep her head low and her voice lower, for fear that she might catch the wrong attention. His gaze is unwavering, and she cannot read it, and she shakes like a leaf.

He makes a vague gesture toward her horns, and she retreats into herself, pulling her shoulders up around her ears, as though she can physically shrink small enough to disappear.

Before she can answer, he huffs out a breath of smoke, slapping his forehead. "I'm sorry, that was probably rude. Sometimes I say the wrong things and get people all riled up. I was just wondering about the, uh. Legends."

Io tugs on the long braid of her faintly glowing hair and tries to fix her mouth into a smile. The result is a small, wibbling thing, not remotely believable. "I never know until it's too late," she murmurs, losing her voice at the end of her sentence.

She expects him to look at her with disgust, revile, or fear, and to walk off. She expects his face to change into a mask of hatred like the people around them, like so many people in her past.

But Edér smiles, a genuine smile that creases his tanned face with laugh lines, and claps her on the shoulder with one large hand. Io stares at his hand in shock, unable to move her gaze from the spot where it lay even after he takes it back.

"Better odds than I've had lately," he laughs.

Io beams at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obsidian, I just wanna talk,,,
> 
> There was just not enough Edér fic in this fandom so apparently I'm here to single-handedly flood the tag.
> 
> I'm on [Tumblr](http://grrowlithe.tumblr.com) if you wanna come yell about Obsidian's greatest mistake with me!


	2. nightmares

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edér finds the Watcher during a quiet moment in Ondra's Gift.

Edér isn’t sure what wakes him.

Their party had decided to bunk down in the Salty Mast for the night, much to Durance’s enjoyment and Pallegina’s chagrin. It had been a difficult day, and to say they could all use the sleep (or the distractions, in some cases) is an understatement.

Even Edér is starting to chafe under the bustling of the city, and he likes to consider himself a pretty easy going fellow. All these scholars, and thugs, and animancers, set his teeth on edge in a way that even Raedric’s men never had. Defiance Bay has a quality to it, he can’t quite put his finger on it, but it is something that seems to suck the soul right out of a person.

He had really been looking forward to a full night’s sleep in a proper bed, and he hadn’t been feeling particularly picky about where that bed happened to be located, which is why it’s particularly disconcerting for him to find himself fully awake in the middle of the night, sitting up in bed with only the light of the moon for comfort.

Except the light that he’s seeing through his window is not the light of the moon at all. Or, rather, it is, just not the one in the sky.

Edér stands from his bed and leans closer to the window, pulling back the moth-bitten curtain for a better look. The moon in the sky is just a sliver tonight, hardly enough light to see two inches in front of his face. At the end of the docks, a much smaller circle glows brightly, enough for him to make out the outline of a figure with long white hair.

With a sigh, he pulls his white linen shirt over his head and shoves his bare feet into his boots. He isn’t going to be getting back to sleep any time soon. Might as well make sure they weren’t going to be attacked in the middle of the night.

The docks of Ondra’s Gift are much quieter than he had feared. He guesses folk aren’t keen to walk around in the middle of the night when patrons of the Salty Mast are being attacked seemingly out of nowhere. It makes it all the more unsettling to find the Watcher standing out here alone, wearing only her trousers and an untucked shirt, entirely unarmed. She’s always had an air of fragility to her, but he’s never seen her as breakable as she is at this moment.

“Seems unfair for you to go for a midnight stroll after we did all that work fittin’ Bear up those stairs.” He’s trying for a joke, but only feels guilty when she jumps about a foot in the air. She turns to face him, and her eyes are wide as saucers. She’s trembling, whether from the cold, or from something else, he’s unsure.

She wraps her arms around herself. Her ill-fitting shirt flutters loosely in the breeze and Edér finds himself admiring the silhouette of her form suggested in the fabric. She always seems to swim in whatever clothes she finds to wear, giving the impression of a small animal nesting in a pile of fabrics.

“I had a nightmare.” Her voice is quiet and distant, the way it goes when someone makes a comment about her… appearance, and Edér has an irrational urge to put an arm around her. He shoves his hand in his pocket instead.

“Is it the one where you show up to church with no pants on and the whole congregation points and laughs at you? Because I get that one a lot.”

The Watcher gifts him with a huff of air that he _thinks_ is a laugh. “No. I think I’d have to know what church is like before I can have that one,” she murmurs.

She turns away from him and bends over to roll her trousers to the knee. Edér stares hard into the distance until she is upright again, and she perches down on the docks to dip her feet into the water.

With an overdramatic groan, Edér mutters something about his kneecaps as he kneels down beside her. He doesn’t put his feet into the water (he’s pretty sure Maea dumps her sewage in here, but he doesn’t mention that at this moment). Instead, he crosses his legs underneath him and kneels back on his hands, trying to appear relaxed as he listens intently to their surroundings for unseen assailants.

“Can I tell you about my nightmare?” She asks the question so quietly, he nearly doesn’t hear. But he gives her a friendly hum of approval, not wanting to spook her. She hasn’t spoken much since he met her, despite his best efforts, and he’s not about to thwart himself now. “I was in a dark house, and I heard a baby crying. It was crying so loudly, it was as though I could hear it in my very soul. In the... The part of me that belongs to Ondra. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like there’s a small spot in my belly that feels like _her._ When this baby cried, I felt that part of me vibrating, vibrating so fiercely I thought I might retch. So I ran forward, trying to find the child, to help it. And then, there was a little cradle, at the end of a long dark hallway. I started to feel the retching feeling stronger than ever, like I was going to fall unconscious, but I just knew I had to reach the cradle. So I pushed through. And when I came upon it, it… the child was hollowborn.” She shudders, a full-body wracking that stops only when she folds in entirely on herself. “The child had my face. Before I knew what was happening, I was throwing it into the bay.”

Edér is surprised to find a fat tear rolling down her face, though she rubs it away so quickly he wonders if he’d imagined it.

“Buoys, they call them,” she whispers. “How can they be so casual about something so dreadful, Edér?”

Edér sits up, folding his hands into his lap for lack of a better place to put them. “I can’t rightly say,” he says uselessly.

The Watcher—Io—covers her face, and the light from her horns dims a bit. “How can someone throw away a baby like so much garbage?” Her voice is muffled, and she sounds so defeated that it unsettles him. He’s never seen her look anything but content, humming as she completes tasks or twining flowers around her horns. He wonders how much sadness she has hidden away inside her all this time.

“Folks in the Dyrwood, they fear what they don’t know,” he says finally. “The Legacy’s got ‘em all kinds of crazy, doing things they’d never do out of fear. Some of them think it’s punishment from the gods, others think it’s a curse caused by animancy. If they thought the hollowborn were truly their babies, they’d never hurt them, I’m sure of it.”

She lifts her head to gaze at him, but eyes seem to be looking through him instead of directly at him. “Wouldn’t they?”

The question lays heavily between them, her unspoken past something he can only guess at. It’s not like he hasn’t known better than to ask about her parents all this time, after all.

The silence stretches long and thin between them, and Edér can’t seem to look away from her face. The light of her horns dances in the wet tears shining in her eyes, and it entrances him for a moment, before he has to shake it off and scold himself for being so fanciful.

“That boy, Derrin,” she says suddenly, turning back to look out at the wrecked ship in the bay. “I saw his last moments. He…” She trails off and swallows hard, and for a moment Edér thinks she’s finished speaking, before she finally continues. “He was trying to save a woman. She was being attacked by some thugs in the street, and he wanted to rescue her.” She pulls on her hair, looking more distressed than he’s ever seen her. “They stabbed him. He drowned.”

Edér isn’t quite sure what to say, so he opts to rest a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t seem as surprised by his small touches anymore, and it pleases him to know that she trusts him. Her friendship has come to mean a lot to him in these past months traveling with her. She leans into it now, her hands fluttering like nervous moths around her.

“I didn’t feel anything when I stabbed him back,” she murmurs, almost unintelligible. Edér nods, pulling her into his side and tilting his head to give her room to rest her head on his shoulder. She wraps an arm around his bicep and yawns. “I’m glad I did it, Edér. Does that make me a terrible person?”

He smiles, shaking his head, not minding the way his jaw bumps against her horns. “Nah. I think it makes you a carin’ one.”

She sighs, the deep and heavy sigh of someone exhausted inside and out. “I’m going to save them, Edér,” she says quietly, sounding a bit unsure. “I have to.”

Edér nods. “I’ll be right behind you.”

She shudders again, and this time he knows it’s not from cold. “Can I stay here for a bit longer?” she asks, sniffling.

He doesn’t even hesitate to nod again, and perhaps he should worry that she has him under some sort of spell that he can’t say no to her, except he’s not sure he can find it in him to care.


End file.
